Google announced the expansion in a post on The Keyword by DeepMind VP Pushmeet Kohli. The portal at synthid.com accepts uploads of images, video and audio and reports whether they carry SynthID watermarks from Google or its partners OpenAI, NVIDIA and Kakao, with Apple expected to follow. Until now the detector was limited to a test group of journalists, media professionals and researchers who got access at Google I/O last year; the public version runs in English only for now and requires signing in.
The scale is the story. Built-in verification in Search, the Gemini app and Chrome now regularly handles over 1 million requests daily, per Google. The detector is explicit about its limits: “This is not a general AI detector” and it cannot identify content that does not use SynthID, nor distinguish AI-created from AI-edited media.
The fragmentation risk stays. Microsoft and Meta maintain their own watermarking and verification systems, and their tools have often failed to identify content from their makers’ own models, meaning the three competing standards cover only a subset of what is actually generated.